"Cahiers du Cinéma" (An Anthology in Four Volumes)

Cahiers du Cinéma is a French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. The controversial texts published in its first decade revolutionized the way the world thought about cinema. In this period, critics that would soon become an acclaimed group of filmmakers (Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, Rivette, later known as part of the movement Nouvelle Vague) wrote about la politique des auteurs (the auteur theory), that is, the director as the only author of the film, and became known for its violent attacks in the literary cinema, la tradition de qualité (quality tradition), that pleased the older generations, also called cinéma du papa (daddy's cinema). In the next years, Cahiers developed further its theories until the events of May 1968, where it became radically politicized in Maoism.

This anthology in four volumes reunites several texts by its most important contributors along almost three decades (1951-1978), all translated in English. They can be briefly summarized as follows:
  • Volume 1 (1951-1959, edited by Jim Hillier) - Texts by Bazin, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, among many others. This period is known for its introduction of the concept of auteur, the acclaim of the American cinema, the attack on the tradition de qualité and the attention given to the mise en scène (film directing). It's also known for the yellow covers in the magazine; 
  • Volume 2 (1960-1968, edited by Jim Hillier) - Texts by Hoveyda, Aumont, Morlet... After the triumph of the Cahiers group with films as Les 400 Coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) and À Bout de Souffle (Breathless, 1960), the magazine had acquired an international respect for its intellectual merits. In this period, some of its earlier theories (as the authorship) were further debated. At the same time, a new group of auteurs were acclaimed and film critics as Hoveyda gave even more importance to the mise en scène
  • Volume 3 (1969-1972, edited by Nick Browne) - Texts by Daney, Oudart, Comolli... After the events of May 1968, Cahiers became politicized and committed to Maoism. As a result, film criticism in the magazine became based on Marxist and psychoanalytical theories, creating concepts as the "suture" (a permanent fusion between the spectator and the film, that makes the former forget that he is watching the latter through the camera's eye) and discussing structuralism and semiotics; 
  • Volume 4 (1973-1978, edited by David Wilson) - Texts by Daney, Deleuze, Toubiana... In a way, an extension of the previous volume, although it is also marked by an increasing focus on the cinema per se as well as a return to more commercial films. 
Excerpts:

"You can refute Hawks in the name of Ray (or vice versa), or admit them both, but to anyone who would reject them both I make so bold as to say this: Stop going to the cinema, don't watch any more films, for you will never know the meaning of inspiration, of a view-finder, of poetic intuition, a frame, a shot, an idea, a good film, the cinema. An insufferable pretension? No: a wonderful certainty."
François Truffaut, "A Wonderful Theory" in Volume 1, translated by Liz Heron.

"Party Girl has an idiotic story. So what? If the substratum of cinematic work was made up simply of plot convolutions unravelling on the screen, then we could just annex the Seventh Art to literature. (...) Party Girl comes just at the right moment to remind us that what constitutes the essence of cinema is nothing other than mise en scène. It is mise en scène which gives expression to everything on the screen, transforming, as if by magic, a screenplay written by someone else and imposed on the director into something which is truly an author's film."
Fereydoun Hoveyda, "Nicholas Ray's Reply: Party Girl" in Volume 2, translated by Norman King.

"Suture represents the closure of the cinematic enonce in line with its relationship with its subject (the filmic subject or rather the cinematic subject), which is recognised, and then put in its place as the spectator - thus distinguishing the suture from all other types of cinema, particularly the so-called 'subjective' cinema, where the suture did exist, but undefined theoretically"
Jean Pierre Oudart, "Cinema and Suture" in Volume 3, translated by Kari Hanet.

"With Pickpocket, Bresson provided the ideological and formal model for the mise en scène of these fringes of society. He furnished the ideological model by making the heroes of his films characters, such as a pickpocket or a saint, who were least susceptible of recuperation (unless by an all-seeing God). And he provided the formal model by filming the gaze which nothing in the world or out of the frame (which amounts to the same thing) could satisfy or suture."
Serge Daney, "A Particular Trend in French Cinema" in Volume 4, translated by Jill Forbes.

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